It's not very often that I get to check out my food while it's still on the vine. Being able to do so was pretty cool. Of course, I imagine there could be better ways to appreciate a sexy tomato still on the vine than deciding to batter it and pan fry it in bacon grease - but why bother?

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When TA and I stopped in New Orleans on our cross country trek I finally tried red beans and rice for the first time.

It was out of this world delicious.

How has more soul food not made it to the Pacific Northwest? I feel like I've missed out on such a diverse cuisine by not experimenting more with the various regional 'delicacies' present in my own country.

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I think summer is definitely the season of pulled pork. I've been seeing it all over the place! In last month's issue of Gourmet, on several food blogs, and in some stores - it seems like pulled pork is everywhere I look. I thought I should hop on the bandwagon and try it out for myself.

As I've mentioned before, I'm not a huge fan of the sweeter side of things, so I was looking forward to manipulating a recipe to appeal to my more savory taste buds. This was the first time I ever tried roasting pork, so first I tried to get an idea of how exactly you go about making one of these babies so tender you can shred it with a fork.

I was interested in using Gourmet's recipe, but as the name would imply, it was pretty gourmet. I wasn't really looking to make this some extravagant ordeal.

I knew for sure I wanted to use the Apple Cider Sweet Onion Sauce over on How To Cook Like Your Grandmother (No, Drew. I promise I'm not stalking you, you've just inspired some heady cravings the last few days.)I ended up just combining a bunch of different recipes and flew by the seat of my pants. Thankfully, my pants are pretty damn good at flying.

I didn't make the onion sauce exactly the way I was supposed to, well, because sometimes I just don't like to follow directions.

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Last night we revisited comfort food with pulled pork sandwiches and macaroni salad. For the salad I used Drew Kime's recipe over on How To Cook Like Your Grandmother I can't say that I'm an outrageous macaroni salad fan, I definitely couldn't make a whole meal out of it like Drew said he can. But it was pretty delicious and it went perfectly with the pulled pork.

Other than halving the recipe and omitting celery seed (didn't have any) I followed Drew's recipe word for word, so if you're interested in some macaroni deliciousness I suggest you click on those links above to find out how.